Civil War: Tristan Patrick McDaniel vs Evan Andrews
by Okoriwadsworth
Summary: The Story, chapter by chapter, of the most prominent rivalry in e-fedding history. No real-world characters here. All OC's.
1. The Final Battle

There were 55,000 people there that night, they told them. They told them it was all for them, that the knowledge that this would be the last battle between "The Wrestling Machine" Tristan McDaniel and "The New Age Punisher" Evan Andrews was too powerful to not sell out a building this big. However, neither one of them cared all that much about the people in the crowd. All that mattered to them was that they was here finally, doing the thing that they had dreamed about doing. All of the pain, all the sacrifice, was finally worth it. It was what they had spent their lives wanting, and it was finally here. It dawned on them, finally, that they had reached their moment. The chance to be to this generation of wrestling fans what their heroes had been to them. Like Misawa and Kawada in the 1990's, and Flair-Steamboat in the 1980's, this was the wrestling rivalry of the 2000's. They were as sure of it as anything, and this was their magnum opus moment.

But how did Tristan McDaniel and Evan Andrews get to this place, and how have their careers become endlessly entwined with each other into a Gordian knot of resentment, grudging respect, and volcanic competitive zeal? How did we get here? That's the part everyone wants to know about, now that both men's careers have finally separated, and in the case of one, ended forever.

But to truly understand what they meant to the sport they loved, and how their rivalry influenced wrestlers they would never meet or compete against, we have to start with what made this feud so special. And to be quite honest, to simply describe it as a feud in no way does it justice. This was a battle between two men who each wanted to achieve as much glory as it was possible for anyone to achieve, only to find their path blocked by the other. And each man found their complete, exact, polar opposite staring back at them blocking them from what they want. For Tristan McDaniel, the rakishly good-looking technician from Chicago whose all-American good looks and vast reservoirs of technical skill made him one of the most adored wrestlers of recent memory, he found himself staring back at a man who fancied himself a god among mortal men who possessed an arsenal of attacks and strategies that equaled his own, and a mastery of the sport's gray and black arts that far exceeded his own.

As for Evan Andrews, the inscrutable masked destroyer from the farthest end of Canada whose narcissism and undisguised God complex is matched only by his explosive talent, the roadblock to the success he knew himself entitled to came in the form of someone who was all too capable of attacking his own weaknesses, and someone as gifted.

This was a rivalry that would partition the sport into 2 equal halves, one side believing Evan Andrews had the killer instinct necessary for greatness, the other believing that Tristan McDaniel had the kind of technical brilliance found very rarely.

But to understand the story, one has to know where both men came from.


	2. Birth Of A Machine

Chapter 2: Birth Of A Machine

If you asked the family of Tristan Patrick McDaniel what it exactly was they remember about his birth, which paradoxically took place on the day that Ireland declared independence from England (which for our non-Hibernian readers takes place on December 6th), there are many answers that you might expect. Perhaps a remark on driving down a highway in a super-fast car, or a father passing out in the delivery room. But instead what everyone remembers is this: Tristan was a quiet baby. He cried immediately, as if he wanted to get the necessary expressions of noise out of the way.

His older sister Fionna was the first to notice it. "It's funny", she said. "Everyone sees the career that he's gone in to, and assumes he has this broad and outsized personality. It's a fair assumption, but it was never Tristan. It's never been him. He cried because you hurt him, or because he was hungry. He never cried just to cry, or to test his lungs."

There was something else different about the birth of Tristan Patrick McDaniel, a kid so Irish that he already came out of the womb with what everyone knew would be long red hair. It was covered in all the local papers, from the Sun Times to the Tribune and everywhere else in between. What was the reason for the coverage befitting the birth of a prince, or a king? The answer to this is very simple.

In essence, his father was royalty (or about as close to royalty as one can get in the United States.) When your father is the Priest, James Brian McDaniel, and he ruled Chicago wrestling with the kind of iron fist that makes dictators jealous while somehow managing to remain benevolent and a widely understood heroic figure, your birth is going to be big news especially when you are considered to be the heir to that throne. There's just one problem with the narrative as everyone understood it: The Priest wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.

"James was a simple man", said one of his closest friends Brian Jackson, the long-time wrestling reporter at the Sun-Times. "All he really wanted for his kids was for them to not feel the same 'calling' that he had. He wanted Tristan, in particular, to have absolutely nothing to do with the sport. He knew what it did to him, the effect it had on his body and soul, and didn't want his son to be plagued by those same feelings. And so very early on, especially with Tristan, he placed all of his trophies and awards, all of the proof that he was this heroic figure, out of the view of his only son."

And as Tristan was brought home, with a full police escort and coverage on local news, his father made the promise to himself that would define every waking moment of his son's life: He would never allow his son to follow in his footsteps. He'd rather disown him than let him enter the sport that he loved as much as he had hated.

But, at least for a little while, this wasn't even an idea. Tristan would be raised as his father's son, explicitly, with all of the privileges that entailed. He would never want for education, or for good clothes. His was as close to a life of royalty as an American child could get. But for all of the benefits of being raised as a McDaniel, something was always missing to hear Tristan tell it.

"It's really not that difficult to understand, you know", said Fionna McDaniel. "All we wanted when we were kids is to be close to our father, to know he loved us and wanted us to be as successful as he was. It's kind of hard to do that when he holds you at arm's length, and out of the most important parts of his life. I always felt like there was some reason he didn't love us, something wrong intimately with how we were as kids that couldn't make him wrap his arms around us like I saw other fathers around us doing with their kids. And I handled it poorly, I'll admit. I developed a drinking problem. But Tristan was different. He was the little brother, the prince of the family, and Dad favored him. Tristan always looked out for me, though, and Mom. Especially when Dad started drinking."

Up until his preschool years, Tristan knew his father as nothing other than an occasionally gruff and menacing man who was short with hugs, and long on critiques to his book-smart older sister Fionna, but who also tried to do the best for his kids that he could. But when Tristan went into school, James was forced to retire due to a nagging knee injury and the troubles began almost immediately. Soon, the gruffness became out-and-out rage, blunted only by those all-too-frequent nights when James slipped into drunken stupors. And as Tristan Patrick McDaniel graduated from high school, on the Dean's List at Tilden High, he had already planned his escape. First would be college at the University of Michigan. Then next, he would follow his dream, the dream he had forced himself to hide from his father. What was this dream, you might be asking? Simple. The dream of becoming a professional wrestler.


	3. Born Into Punishment

Chapter 3: Born into Punishment.

At this exact time, in a small pediatric ward in a small hospital in Nova Scotia, another child was born, and this one was as far apart from the man who would become his rival as could possibly be. While Tristan was born in a clean pediatric ward with a small flotilla of doctors trained to understand every problem, no matter how small, Evan Alexander Andrews did not have the same luxury. His was a birth defined by this simple fact: No one paid attention more than they had to.

Sure, when he was born, his mother hugged him and kissed him. But that was without a trace of emotion, save for one not commonly thought of as a building block to a strong family unit: Obligation.

(Author's note: Evan's entire family, as well as quite a few the people who were willing to be interviewed for this story, are notoriously private, and thus kept all comments close to the vest.)

"His family were not well-off obviously" said Marie Beliveau, a family friend of the Andrews's and one of the few members of the family who was willing to be interviewed on the record for this piece. "But there have been plenty of families from this part of Canada who aren't loaded with money or riches of any other kind. What really bothered me, and helped to make Evan into the person that he is now, was all the rest of it."

And by "the rest of it", Mrs. Beliveau means this: Evan's father, a stocky longshoreman named David Andrews, was gruff beyond anyone's reasonable expectations of him. But as you think about it, lots of children have been raised by fathers who were demanding, for whom an A was simply satisfactory and an A-plus expected. But, while there is kind of a razor-thin difference between demanding excellence from a child and abusing him, Evan Andrews's father never cared for respecting that difference. Rather, he was and remains the sort of person who demanded perfection and didn't much care what those demands would do to his gentle son who wanted nothing more, **craved** nothing more, than to be the apple of his father's eye.

However, if we're being honest with ourselves and with you, the tornado didn't start when Evan was born. In fact, for the first little while, there wasn't even a tornado. Not even a hint of one. The tornado started when Evan's mother, over the objections of her family who absolutely didn't want any part of what it is that they knew him to represent, got married to David Andrews. That is when the tornado started.

And the worst part of this whole sad tornado Evan found himself standing in the middle of? There was no one to pull him out of it, show him the love any small child needs and deserves. His maternal grandmother, someone you might expect would be there for her grandson? Emotionally unavailable to the point that talking to the Peggy's Cove lighthouse might have provided more support and succor. His mother, the woman who spent 9 months birthing him and should have been there to pull her rabid dog of a husband off of her baby boy, and only child? An isolated woman who found no safe place in her home, with a man her parents weren't particularly fond of, she eventually committed suicide when Evan was 10.

Left with nothing else to do, and no escape from a father for whom perfection was increasingly becoming no longer enough, Evan found an escape. He found it in pro wrestling, and to be more specific, in the hard-hitting and ultra-respectful style found in Japan. to him, this was what he needed to be, the place he needed to go to fulfill the burning need for acceptance within him. So in secret, he began training while managing to be the man his father seemed to believe he craved.

Strangely, however, something began to happen with all of the hours he spent training. The meek little boy who started, who wanted and craved nothing more than to be accepted, began to notice something about himself. He began to notice how good he was at this thing, and it began to warp him. Slowly, slower than these things happen in fictional movie universes, but it still happened. Before too long, Evan Andrews began to believe himself to be superior than all of his classmates, and started to act like it. And to be fair, he actually was. Blessed with a kind of athleticism that is not seen all too often, plus a deep wellspring of intelligence, he soon became the best prospect to come out of the North End Gym in quite a long time. And on the day of his high school graduation, seconds after getting his diploma, Evan Andrews got on a plane and headed to Japan to see about becoming the best wrestler in Japan.

And now, THIS is where we begin our story.


	4. Chapter 4: From a Spark, a Fire Burns

With everything that happened since, and all of the ugly words that have been passed between both sides, it might be instructive to try and remember what the first time they saw each other was actually like, and how that training session actually went. Because while supporters from both sides have long stated their versions of the "truth", which coincidentally happen to make their chosen hero come out the victor, it's perhaps the best for the history of this compelling rivalry if we actually honestly discuss what happened.

First, if for no other reason than because it will help, a touch of the backstory that brought us to this point. Firstly, for someone who would later be defined by his supreme confidence, Evan Andrews was not, in any way, anything resembling the force of supreme confidence that we would later know him to be when he first arrived in Japan. To be blunter about this, he was nervous in a way that he would never admit to. Imagine, if you will for a moment, the position that he found himself in at the age of 19. Firstly, taking the longest flight that you have ever taken anywhere to go to a strange country that you have only read about in a yellowed World Atlas. Add to that the fact that rudimentary is an insult to his knowledge of Japanese at the time, and you start to get an idea of what he was up against. However, as you might understand, purpose is a glorious thing. And considering the idea that all he had wanted, the only thing he ever needed to truly define himself, was the idea of being the best in Japan and you also get an idea of why it was that he was never going to fail when given a chance to live out his dream, fully.

"Canada has a rich wrestling history, as everyone knows. We've had multiple world champions, and legends, from here", said Gary McDonald, head wrestling writer for the Halifax Chronicle-Herald. "But with all of that history, comes a whole bunch of pressure. And while he might never talk about it now, he thought about it back then. He felt like all of those legends, all of those **_ghosts_**, weren't going to be satisfied until he finished this. It's kind of like being the next great Jamaican track star. No matter how good you are, how many Olympic medals you win, you have to accept that you're laying a brick in a house so many other people have started to build before you even got there."

Conversely, and this is perhaps the hardest thing for his fans to be able to wrap their heads around, Tristan did not arrive in Japan as the highly moral defender of right and wrong that we know him to be today. In fact, when he headed to Japan, he went there as much to get rid of a bad reputation as it was to create one for himself. You see, when he graduated from noted taskmaster Pat Mack's school, it was with a strong basis in the fundamentals and, quite frankly, an equally strong temper.

"It's weird to say this now, considering the man he turned himself into, but Tristan McDaniel got himself on a plane to Japan because Pat Mack wanted to teach him how much of a detriment his temper actually was" said Brian Jackson. "Knowing that someone who had that much potential was going to squander it because they couldn't keep their emotions under any kind of control hurt him in a way that I couldn't explain if I had all the words in the world. But Pat wasn't just going to let it go. He sent him to Japan hoping that the discipline would be good for him, that maybe in some way he could find some way to focus himself so that he wouldn't squander what everyone knew was phenomenal natural ability."

And so, the young lions who would become kings of all they surveyed flew on planes to an archipelago 1\2 an ocean away known for creating as many great wrestling stars as they broke.

"The Japanese dojo system is infamous for what you have to go through to survive", said Brian Jackson. "I mean, the conditioning work alone is ridiculous. It **_destroys_** young wrestlers if they're not ready for it. The stories are legion of the young hotshots who walked into that place, thought they knew what was coming, and couldn't survive it. So when we all heard that Tristan wasn't only going to fly over to Japan for training, but that he **_volunteered _**for the experience, we all thought that there was no way he was going to survive. Absolutely no way."

"We all understood why it was he was doing it, but none of us thought he was going to get through it" said Gary McDonald. "I mean, Japan is the crucible for a lot of prospects. We all heard the stories about the guys who walked in there with the confidence Evan was known for. The thing you have to understand about the dojos, and this was especially true back then, is that the teachers there hated young guys, and despised gaijin. So you show up as both? They made it their mission in life to cripple people, and everyone in Canada more or less expected that he was going to be another of those guys who they sent back a ruined broken shell. We all knew it. So did I. And I've never been happier to be wrong about something."


End file.
